During his victory speech on Monday evening, François Legault made reference to this famous sentence by René Lévesque who said that Quebeckers perhaps formed something like a great people. Only, Legault, unsurprisingly, removed his hesitation from Lévesque’s sentence, by affirming with a far from Lévesquian assurance that we were a great people, period.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
I’ve been thinking about this sentence ever since, with muted questioning coming from all sides (except from the government…) about the current voting system, which blurs the will of this same people. Should we not have the courage to leave aside the prefabricated sentences on the supposed lack of interest of the electorate on the subject of electoral reform, if we want to claim to be great?
I also wonder if a great people need to insist that they are a great people. Since we like hockey analogies among these people: did Guy Lafleur need to say that he was a great hockey player? I think of the Romans, the Mongols, the Haitians, all great peoples, asking myself: does a great people need to be convinced that it is? Isn’t the strength of greatness in action rather than in pompous words of victory?
This is what René Lévesque had understood: his hesitation marks the philosophical modesty essential to any people of stature (I am thinking of Roman stoicism, for example), far from the bursting of suspenders and the garish red caps of greatness.
Great men and great women, great non-binary beings and great communities everywhere, giants of history of all colors and ideologies are great in their deeds, not in their mere proud perpetuation -even in history.
Some reminded us of it on Monday evening: the first CAQ term had its hands too full with the pandemic, which was also outsourced, to accomplish great things. There have essentially been two controversial identity laws that have mostly secured the party’s re-election, and little else tangible. Is the CAQ a great party, or will it be remembered as what led to something else? Everything is still to be drawn. Nothing big has happened in Quebec in the last four years, the work is ahead.
One thing is certain, a great people does not drop the cosmopolitan urbanity of its definition of itself.
A great people does not divide its citizens on the basis of anything, especially not their ethnicity or their immigration status.
A great people have enough confidence in who they are not to have to define themselves in broad strokes in the public square at every street corner.
May this second mandate of the CAQ be a mandate of confidence, of forgetting the next elections, of the concern to build something great for the future, which is nevertheless well within the very name of the party in power.
Make way for the future, make way for creation, make way for Quebec diversity. For my part, I will paraphrase Paul-Émile Borduas, who denounced in 1948 in Global denial the fact of belonging, on the contrary, to a small people who fled the world of ideas and its risks of novelty to content themselves with reproducing themselves in continuity. He also denounced, well, that his people constantly defined themselves in their relationship to the United States and France, to the detriment of the authentic creations of their own oppressed classes. On election night, I reread Global denialand I felt at home.